Netrunner is perhaps one of the most infamous card games around right now. And with its thriving competitive scene, fascinating asynchronous gameplay style and wealth of expansions its not really hard to imagine why.Netrunner give you control of a massive Corparation set in a cyberpunk dystopia. Your goal? To advance the agenda cards in your deck to completion. You do this by investing both Credits and Clicks (the game's unit of time) into advancing an agenda. Once an agenda is completed you gain access to bonus assigned to that card (which can range from anything from a personal police force to the elimination of a rival corp. .) and the allotted points assigned to it. The first one to seven points wins.
The opposing Runner however, plays the game in a completely different fashion. The Runner aims to hack into the corporation's networks and steal the agenda cards to add them to their score.Additionally, the Corporation can win if they force the Runner into discarding more cards than they have in their hand, and the Runner can force the the Corporation into losing by depleting their deck to the point where they can't draw at the beginning of their next turn.
Your role as the runner is to basically employ every ability and opportunity you can to rob the enemy corporation of all their power and influence and leave them teetering husk, barely capable of paying next months rent. Its a thrilling concept and its every bit as slick in execution as it is in theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAslVfZ9p-Y
The biggest assets the corporation has is deception and secrecy. Most of the corporation turn is spent installing assets, playing agendas, or installing and upgrading "Ice" barriers that attempt to stop the enemy runner gaining access to their system.
All of these are played face down and it's only when a corporation pays to "rez" them that they flip up and become active. Bluffing thus becomes a very integral part of the game when you're playing a corporation as you constantly trying to coax the hacker into spending effort on attacking heavily defended cards that turn out to be worthless, while the more dangerous stuff sits undefended and thus ignored.
But the Runner has a similar advantage in that they can attack the corporation of various fronts via employing Runs. In a run, the Runner attacks one of the Corporation’s servers in an attempt to access their cards, usinginstalled programs to help him pass the Corporation’s defenses. Runs are a miniature battle in themselves and you'll need to deploy various abilities in these phases in order to bypass the corporation's defences. If you manage to succeed you can force your enemy into drawing and discarding multiple cards into their hand, or deploy a variety of other effects.
That's only the core basics though. Netrunner is hideously complex to a beginner, but once you get going and see how the pieces fall into place its a utterly fantastic game with a incredible amount of depth to it. Every match is rife with an inescapable element of tension and the massive array of cards on offer means that there's always the possibility of something expected being sprung on you.
The game has a fantastic amount of variety to it and any strategy you could care to dream up is most likely possible within even the core sets. There are a quite a number of expansion packs on offer for the game that add even more depth into a game that could hardly be asking for more. The board can get immensely cluttered when playing, so its well worth investing in a play mat, luckily there's already a large range of these on the market so you won't be left wanting for one that suites your deck.
Netrunner is a "Living Card Game" which means that it essentially throws away the blind-buy purchase model of booster packs. The core set features 252 cards which allows you to build quite a large array of decks. If you want to get into Netrunner the core set is all you really need. The art-work is fantastic all round and makes fantastic use of the core cyberpunk theme and it really hammers home how slick the whole thing is.
Once it has its claws into you though the expansions are quite hard to resist. Each adds 3 copies of 20 cards (so 60 in total) to you collection and these are still getting released monthly. There are also deluxe expansions that focus on cards for each faction's different characters; so players choosing to specialize in a particular play-style can easily get what they're looking for.
It's a great model for the game as it makes it easy for everyone to get on a level playing field. It has also resulted in a thriving competitive scene springing up around the game. The deep level of complexity of and the two asynchronous method of play makes it perfectly suited for high level competitive play and after attending a small local tournament I can easily see myself getting quite into it.
Netrunner was actually created by Richard Garfield, the man behind Magic: The Gathering. Netrunner was his attempt to make a game that was more based on player skill and the bluffing elements of poker. It shows as the luck of the draw is a minimal factor in Netrunner. A deceitful and careful player can more or less always overwhelm a lucky one. So, if you're looking for a card game to get into in a competitive fashion I cant recommend Netrunner enough.
